The adaptive filter investigated in our earlier work (supported by an NIH grant of this same title) has been demonstrated to remove the maternal ECG from the abdominal signal so that fetal signals one seventh as large in magnitude as the maternal signals are clearly brought out even when coincident in time with the maternal signals. Even so, much must be done to improve the signal to noise ratio and to utilize the improved signals for the better understanding of the fetal cardiac signal and for better monitoring during gestation and the birth process. A hardware analogue implementation has been built and a digital unit for greater precision is being developed. These units will greatly ease the handling of data and make further work more profitable. An expansion of the fetal signals (first and second orthogonal functions) will be obtained by a modified averaging technique. We further plan to use the much improved FECG: to obtain the FHRR and beat-to-beat variability, to investigate the vector nature of the signal at different gestational ages. Heavy clinical interaction is involved in consultation, obtaining data, and validating results.